


Peachy

by BlueColoredDreams



Series: Hard to Starboard [1]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Anxiety, Canon-typical language, Cuddling & Snuggling, Multi, Pining, Polyamory, Spoilers to ep. 65, canon-typical alcohol use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-24
Updated: 2017-06-24
Packaged: 2018-11-18 12:38:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11290905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueColoredDreams/pseuds/BlueColoredDreams
Summary: Lup takes a sip. Barry reasons. Lucretia has a meltdown.





	Peachy

**Author's Note:**

> One day, I'll write a fic where Lucretia isn't drunk as a skunk but... today is not? that day.  
> Directly post ep. 65.

She’s at the bow when it happens, putting up her shield around the ship— it’s the first test, _real_ test and her teeth are already on edge— when she sees it.

She sees it first as a flash of movement, bright strawberry blonde hair and red, and because she’s always looking, her eye is drawn back from the prow and she sees her just step right off the deck. Sees Lup fall like dead weight, a wild grin on her face and her wand loose between her fingers as her body goes slack against the air and her robes billow up and out, body outlined in the dark air.

Her heart stops. She thinks she may have screamed but she can’t hear anything, and when sweat trickles down her cheek she realizes her jaw is still set tight to dutifully keep her shield going, locked in the magic, and it’s just the sound of her blood in her ears she hears.

She clutches her wand between her hands, feeling sick. And then where the body must lie—Lucretia doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to look, but she _does_ , and just like always, it’s _awful_ , it’s _terrible_ , and she’s so glad she can’t see anything but a sprawl of red against the ground, can’t see the physical damage from here— there’s a glow of bright light, lightening that emanates out from where the body lies and that light just blooms.

A shape rises in the air, a floating afterimage that raises its arms in the maelstrom of ink black and red light.

She looks to the crew. Magnus and Merle look just as similarly distressed as she feels—but Taako’s face has gone pale and his eyes are fixed on her with something like resignation. Barry is white and his eyes fall closed and his chest heaves as he breathes out some sort of helpless prayer. She sees _please_ and _Lup_ come off his lips, and she knows that this was a planned maneuver, that whatever this is, they knew and her heart just sinks, sinks, sinks.

Lup obliterates a column of the Hunger with aplomb and feral joy, and when she reforms she celebrates it, and so does the crew.

Even _she_ does, because how could she _not_? How could she not admire such a feat even though it leaves her mouth as dry and crumbling as autumn leaves? Every single one of them wants to do the exact same thing Lup just did. Every single one of them wants to take a chunk of the Hunger out with them, to fight and destroy it and its army. Even she wants to get her hands on it and rip it into shreds, so Lup is to be commended, to be congratulated, because she is the first to be so efficient in her decimation. 

But… something that _big,_ so existentially altering, to not be noticed.

Lup explains to them with the same cocky grin she had as she stepped off the ship, her weight balanced on her toes as she bounces with excited energy, her eyes glittering and wild as she speaks of phylactery and liches and necromancy and the quiet assurances Barry punctuates her speech with, and… how did she not notice they’d been planning something like this?

She wonders briefly if she would have noticed before. If she hadn’t turned her eyes away, would she have noticed like she had before?

It makes her restless. It makes her uneasy and fidgety and itchy. She can't calm herself in her words or her paints and she knows that sleep will only be uneasy and filled with nightmares of crossbows and echoing voices condemning her as she runs and runs and runs. Everyone spread out on the dirt, small pools of blood and parted dusty lips and fear. Fear, overwhelming, all-encompassing fear. Fear and dirt and fear and oil and fear and blood and fear and ash gray horizons and fear, fear, _fear_ , six broken figures in red and columns of midnight and she knows the sight of Lup stepping backwards  off the ship to a willing death will now visit the rest of the nightmares with the flash of light and heat and waking up and seeing them come for her friends, come for their ship, come for her and knowing she had to leave them all behind to keep them safe.

She's not inclined to deal with the dreams or the aftermath of them.

So she slips out of her room when everyone has fallen asleep, raids the liquor cabinet in the galley, grabs a bottle of peach flavored vodka (it looked the most full of all of them), and takes her favorite perch on the deck, at the prow where she stood just hours previously, shot glass in hand under a dark sky lit by bright violet clustered galaxies.

She pours herself a shot and contemplates how long Lup and Barry had been planning this, this… _thing_. She folds her legs to settle on the deck, throwing back the first glass with practiced ease. She tugs a spare thread from her pajamas and tosses it idly at the atmospheric barrier around the ship, watching the magic flicker and the galaxies waver like an image on water. She pours herself another shot. 

She wonders if they’d been planning it long or if it was something they decided in the last plane. Surely not. As carefree a front that Lup puts up, she isn’t stupid, and impulsively becoming a lich just to do it is a very, very stupid thing to do. She and Barry had probably been planning it since the cycle she was alone, and that thought burns sour in her stomach, up her throat and into her mouth.

Did they not trust her to do it again?

She knocks back her shot and laughs at herself. It wouldn’t matter, in the end.

She pours another, peaches sweet in her mouth but the alcohol burning her from the pit of her throat. Up and over the liquor burn spreads. From behind her sternum then up, to her nose and spreading out and she tosses another back.

Lucretia has her feet hanging over the edge of the ship now, bare toes occasionally brushing the atmospheric barrier and shields, sending magical shocks up her legs, like licking a battery. It's pleasant paired with the alcohol burn and the heat in her face and the way the edges of her fear have started to soften, melted by the sweetness of peaches and the sharpness of the liquor. 

Another.  Another. She’s aiming for the whole bottle, and if they find her passed out up here on the deck, well, she’ll deal with the embarrassment as it comes, she supposes. It wouldn’t be the first time one of them drank themselves stupid in the dead of night. 

“What's going on— oh holy hell, Lucy—”

Lucretia closes her eyes and doesn’t turn. She must be a mess and a half, drinking vodka straight under the starlight night of the new planar system.

But it’s the only thing she could do. She steadies herself for a brief second, preparing to deal with the source of her anxious night; but, oh, she’s never prepared for Lup, so fuck it.

She turns and looks at Lup, one eyebrow raised. “Yeah?”

“Did you just power shot your way through half a bottle of peach vodka?”

“Uh, I think the bottle was already open when I started,” Lucretia offers. “So like. No?”

“I can smell you from here.”

“Bullshit,” she laughs, delighted she still has the sound inside of her.

Lup is at least ten feet away, hovering at the open passage to below deck where their sleeping quarters are. There’s no way Lup could smell her or the alcohol from that far away.

Lup grins at this, hands on her hips. “Okay, fair enough. _Buuuut_ , I’d wondered what kept hitting the shields, but it's just you, Luce, getting turnt up all on your ownsome.”

“Whoops,” Lucretia mumbles. She'd briefly forgotten that Lup’s quarters were right beneath her spot, snagged for the best porthole view on the entire Starblaster decades before. She almost wants to apologize, but she just shrugs instead.

“Yeah, you got busted, my girl,” Lup laughs, dropping her hands and sauntering over.

She plops herself down next to Lucretia, kicking her feet right into the barrier, sending a ripple of white light over it.

“Hooooo boy,” she says, grabbing the bottle of vodka. She grabs Lucretia’s shot glass and pours herself one. “Take a fuckin’ sip, babe.”

A burn that has nothing to do with the vodka spreads across the back of Lucretia’s neck. Sometimes she hates it that she’s still affected by Lup’s incessantly flirtatious nature, eighty two years later and with Lup thirty years in a relationship with someone that’s decidedly _not_ her. Taako’s penchant for calling people epithets never flustered her as much as Lup’s—probably because Lup’s are much more _friendly._ Or maybe Lucretia just wants them to be directed at  _her,_ it’s a toss up, either way. 

Lup knocks the drink back, smacking her lips as she puts the glass back on the deck. “It tastes better than I expect—aaaaholyshit,” she gasps, face contorting in horror, mouth open. “Burns! Lucy, holy fuckin’ Pan! This shit is _nasty_! Drink the _good_ stuff holy fuck—this is one of the cheap-ass ones, oh god—”

Lucretia can’t help but laugh, “You’ve made deserts with this! Have you never drank it straight?”

“Not this one, oh my god,” she gasps. “You just—there’s a reason this one was mostly full, Lucy! Because it’s _shit—_ you’re trying to murder me Luce, but it won’t work, I can haunt your ass all year, man—”

Lucretia feels the grin slide off of her face, just as quickly as if Lup had hit her. She sighs and plucks the cup back up and pours herself another shot.

“Yeah,” she says, tipping it back into her mouth.

The peach flavor isn’t as sweet anymore. Disappointment spreads with the burn and the bitter taste in the back of her mouth. “Yeah, that’s something you can do now.”

“Lucretia?” Lup asks softly, sounding a little taken aback.

Lucretia can see her in the corner of her eye, long dark limbs and messy hair and a worried frown. She’s come straight from bed, cotton shorts and an old Institute tee, worn thin around the collar with the sleeves cut off. Lucretia wants to play with the edges, feel the softness and press her mouth to the pulse against her breast.

She did it once, in a similar situation. It was before she noticed Barry’s gaze lingering on Lup, before she noticed that Lup’s lingered back. It was before the beach world, before the recitals, before she was brave every day.

They’d been drunk and silly and she remembers telling Lup that she was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She told her she’d paint her with opals and gold dust and so much care, and she’d been drunk enough to grab Lup’s hands as she said it. She’d grabbed her hands and kissed them and then cupped Lup’s face and kissed her too, and the words poured from her like water from a spilled pitcher. She thought she was being brave, leading Lup to her bed like that, but she was just being stupid and sloppy and drunk.

She cringes to think of it now. She pours herself another shot just to rid herself of the memories.

She hates herself daily, but the loathing she has for herself in that particular instant is insufferable and immeasurable. While she’s not aged a day physically, she had been so young and so silly and messily in love with Lup.

She’s still messy, honestly. She’s a different sort of mess than before, but she’s still a silly little one. She was the youngest member of the team, and god, does it show. It shows every single day. She’s so much more than she was, but she still feels each mistake like a wound on her skin. She has so much she has to catch up on, so much to learn and so much ground to cover to even be on equal footing with the rest of them. 

She pulls her knees up and rests her chin on them, nursing her next shot in small little tastes that make her tongue burn and go numb.

“Lucy-lu, you okay?” Lup asks her, her voice soft. 

Lucretia shakes her head mutely. 

She has nothing to say to Lup, not anything that makes sense. She doesn’t answer, just watches the system spin its slow dance before them in the void. The scene wavers in her vision and she feels unbalanced, and she knows suddenly that she was drunk about five shots ago.

She knocks back the rest of her glass anyway.

How do you tell someone you slept with nearly seventy years ago that you still think about it? That mostly, you’re fine with being on good terms, being friends, but that sometimes, you still wonder what would have happened if you hadn’t quietly conceded to the awkward silence and embarrassment? That you still _want_ it, despite it being once. Just once, decades and decades ago—that it’s not even the _sex_ you want a repeat of, but the closeness.

_You don’t_ , she thinks.

She had her one night, and it needs to sustain her until the end of time.

She can’t measure up to Barry, who has gone out since day one, made an effort. Learned about the Light and the ship and about Lup. Can’t measure up to a man willing to throw away mortality and humanity with her; Lucretia still balks at dying, still shakes deep in her bones when she thinks about it. She still has to steady herself at times when she goes out on missions, when she asks the others for help, for training. It’s hard—it’s not as hard as it was alone, because there’s nothing in comparison to that year, but her comfort zone had been etched in stone, and it takes a lot to wear those lines away. And, despite his perpetual nervousness, Barry has so consistently done so much for the team, and she’s… she had such a late start. And by then, it was too late. There’s no questioning who’s the better person between them. 

“Lucy, what’s wrong?” Lup presses.

She doesn’t know how to answer.

She’s not even sure what is wrong with her. Something, certainly. But it’s nebulous, unnamed, and it hurts. Part resentment, part envy, part helpless, messy longing, and part tension strung inside of her so tightly she doubts she can relieve it herself, she is a writhing mass of ‘not okay’.

Lucretia aches in the silence. She itches to reach out and grab the bottle and quit with the pretenses, just drink straight from it with the fumes itching up her nose and her mouth burning and drink until she passes out so she won’t have to dream, won’t have to think, just for a second.

But Lup is there, Lup who always intrudes on her thoughts and dreams and desires. Her silent solitude is shattered, and Lucretia cannot bear to give up a single second she could spend with any of them, especially not Lup. Uninterrupted time with Lup is a rare treasure, something Lucretia learned long ago to savor. She will not ruin it by getting sloppily drunk and passing out on the deck of the ship. Not again. Not when it feels right to be in her company, not when she realizes that a night alone wasn’t really what she wanted. 

She feels Lup’s gaze on her and it heats her cheeks and makes her want to squirm. She tries to find an answer, because somewhere in there, the answer lay with Lup herself.

“You… let yourself… you walked right off the ship,” Lucretia says, shocked to hear that her voice doesn’t waver despite the way she shakes on the inside as she pulls the answer from the dark, squirming mass of anxiety inside of her. “Just like that, you just… it looked like you just threw your life away.”

“Oh,” Lup says softly. She shifts, pulls her legs towards her, pressing her palms against her ankles as she crosses her legs. “Hm.”

The noise is soft, contemplative, and Lucretia wishes she hadn’t spoken at all. She shouldn’t be so shaken by what happened, especially not with how wildly overjoyed everyone else was, especially not after eighty-two years of first-hand encounters with death. But Lucretia keeps seeing her step back, keeps seeing her fall, keeps seeing her body like it was in the world of gray stone and ash, limp and dusty and blood under her head from the impact of the fall. She had tried to wake her, at first, because Lup could fix it; she remembers her temperature being lukewarm, her breath sluggish and slow, remembers panicking as she couldn't pull up even the smallest healing spell. She remembers leaving them behind, leaving them for dead as she crawled into the ship when she saw figures on the horizon, fear crawling up her spine and…

Lup just stepped off the ship like it was nothing, like her life meant nothing, like everyone should be fine just watching her plummet to her death. 

“I’m fine,” Lup says. “Better than ever, Lucy. Don’t worry. I'm not going to, like… I'm not suicidal. It's just a… safeguard. So if we all die again, Barry and I’ll still be around to count on. And, it's a bonus that the power’s fuckin’ buck wild.”  

Lucretia shakes her head, leaning her head back to look up at the stars. “It’s not that,” she says. “It’s just… it is that, in its way.”

“You don’t agree with what I did,” Lup says flatly.

“You don’t need _me_ to agree with it,” Lucretia shoots back. “What I think doesn’t matter.”

“That’s not true,” Lup argues, “You’re an important part of the crew, Lucy.”

Lucretia closes her eyes against the pain in her chest. She wishes her feelings weren’t so tangled and knotted. She’d love to pull out the part of her that despairs at being placed lower than friend. If she were just straightforward, she’d see the compliment as what it was, something genuine and warm and proud, but with the way she feels, Lup’s words ring flat against her ears, sounding like something sweet said just to say it.

And she hates that, hates that her own bitterness twists Lup's inclusion into something it's not. She knows Lup means it, but she wants something else.

“It’s not that I don’t _agree_ , it’s just that… I miss you when you die,” Lucretia says, curling against her knees to make herself smaller. “Even if it's just a week, or an hour, or even a minute. I miss you. I… thought I was fine on my own for so long, and because of it I missed so much. I took you for granted.”

“Just me or everyone?”

“All of you,” Lucretia answers promptly. “That year, when you were gone: I missed hearing you in the lab with Barry at all hours. I missed Taako banging pots and pans at 0-500 just to be obnoxious. I missed hearing you pick out a tune on your violin in the evenings, Davenport shouting at Magnus for doing something risky, Merle's stupid snoring and Magnus breaking into my room to see Fisher. Dinner with everyone, fighting over toast in the mornings. Magnus triple brewing espresso and not telling anyone until we’re all chattering messes. When you’re gone, I… I lose myself.”

She inhales shakily, the memory still fresh and poignant and it makes her dizzy. Faintly she knows she's still, and will always be, traumatized by it, but the years have made the knowledge dull and soft and easily ignored. But in times like these, it makes her shake and tremble and it’s sharp in her gut, the wild fear of a single move, the recklessness of guessing whether or not the next action is going to end it all.

She misses her friends when they are gone, she misses them when they're around sometimes, too, and the mere thought of it makes her want to cry in pain.

She does miss Lup most, though. The cycles she's been gone—not just dead, but when she's away, too— have been the worst.

Lup is their spirit, the part of them that keeps them fighting on. Lucretia feels that absence keenly, perhaps more keenly than the members that Lup has segregated out as _others_ —her, Magnus, Merle, and Davenport.

She doesn't dare compare what she feels when Lup is gone to what Taako and Barry do. She's not that privileged. All she knows is that when she needed the most comfort, it was thinking of Lup and her spirit and her words that got Lucretia up off her ass. She drew on all her friends for inspiration that lonely year, but Lup is something special to her.

Maybe she sees Lup as a goal. Her polar opposite, assured and good and devil-may-care, seemingly without a thought of what others think of her, someone that Lucretia first thought she could never be, but realized that she could inch towards it if only she tried. Lup who asks for help, who barges in on the others, who inserts herself seamlessly, as someone that Lucretia wanted to become.

She doesn’t think she’s ever going to be quite like her,  but the desire to do better, do be more proactive since that terrible time alone, it’s certainly done something.

So her role model, then? Maybe a friend. She hopes desperately she is Lup's friend. She wants to be her friend. 

Since she’s taken up more responsibility, more time training with Magnus, more time training with Merle and her magic, more time in the bridge with Davenport, learning things that make her head spin and her eyes cross, Lup has been easier to seek out and chat with.

They are more like equals now. She's not so helplessly lost when Lup starts talking science and arcana, absently spinning up fireballs between her fingers. She has stories to contribute, little things that they found and did and it makes Lup more approachable, more like a friend.

She had thought everyone was her friend before, and they _were_ —but it's different now.  It's a good different, and Lucretia embraces it.

“I mean, I do miss you too,” Lucretia sighs, rubbing her face with her fingers.

“Well,” Lup says. “Now you won't have to.”

Lucretia knows that Lup doesn’t mean for it to be demeaning, doesn’t mean that it feels like a slap in the face, feels like Lup is blatantly undermining what she did and what she’s been planning to do, but it _does_ , and the anger and the not-right feeling boils over.

“You don't get it!” Lucretia snaps, her voice high and shockingly loud in the night air. “ _I don't want you to fucking die in the first fucking place!”_

She wants to sit and just cry. She's so tired, alcohol begging her to do either something incredibly stupid or just cry herself to sleep again.

She struggles against a breath, body shuddering with the instinct to just sob, hands shaking and her heart thudding in her chest. 

“I just—I'm so tired of us dying! I'm sick of it! I'm sick of dealing with it! Of missing you, of having to see you all laid out and broken and wondering if this is _it_ , is this the last time, am I going to have to go through everything alone _again_? What if we all just die, one by one, until there's no one left? And what then? What fucking then? Are we really the only people who can do anything, why is it us, why—and what happens if we just fuckin’, if we just beef it?”

She laughs, bitter and tremulous, shaking her head and throwing her hands out.

“Because I can't do it, I mean, fuck, if I had to carry everyone again, I _could_ and I _would_ because I would do anything for you all. But Lup, I'm not sure what I’d be like if I had to again. I don’t know how whole I’d be if I had to go it alone again—don’t throw it away, Lup, don’t just throw it all away, everything I did—I want you whole and alive, Lup, don’t make me go through this again and again just because you can cheat death by being a lich. I need you to _live_ and be human and warm and not some—some skeletal revenant of yourself. Don't make me look that in the eye, make me look at you dead, look at my failures like that, don't put me through it. Trust me, _live_ , I'm done with the death I think I have a _plan_ and I want to protect you, I want you to live, please, please don't do this to me,” she begs.

She's incoherent and sobbing and she makes herself stop with a shuddering gasp of air, forcing her lungs so full it hurts. She tries to breathe out but she sputters and sobs and gives a choked off wail, just once.

There is a moment of silence as Lucretia puts her face in her hands and breathes through her palms, tears slicking her skin and mouth.

Lup watches her, deeply taken aback by the torrent of emotion that had just poured out of Lucretia. She blinks, then smiles softly, something warm unfurling in her chest. She's fond, and it hurts in the most pleasant way. How does it come to be that she loves the strongest, most fragile of people? 

“You are so much more than you give yourself credit for, Lucretia,” Lup says gently. She reaches out and gently presses her fingers to Lucretia’s shoulder.

Lucretia freezes, her body tight at the unexpected contact, but she soon lets her shoulders relax as Lup presses her palm against her and smoothes it across the plane of her back, fingers spread against the base of her neck.

Some of the ache dissipates with the touch and she relaxes further, letting her eyes fall shut in a moment of rare and raw vulnerability. “Lucy,” Lup says and her voice is soft and low and her fingers begin to rub small circles against her back. “Lucy… oh, Lucretia. It’s okay.”

Lucretia lets the rest of it go, because this is what she needed. Just this, right here. Lup kneads her fingers against her back, firm and steady and Lucretia shakes out a sigh.

“Everyone is so, so, _so_ proud of you. You were always capable of so much, and we never realized it. I hate that it took what it took for us to realize, for _you_ to realize how truly wonderful and surprising and clever you are. Merle is over the moon over your shield spell, Dav is so glad for the help, he finally gets a chance to breathe, Magnus says you do wonderfully in training and with Fisher and Lucy, you did what none of us could do. _I_ couldn't do it. I would lose my fucking mind.”

“Who says I didn't?” Lucretia replies.

“I do,” Lup says firmly and Lucretia's laugh sounds like a sob.

She runs her hand down Lucretia's back, then back up, soothing her until her shoulders stop shaking and the tears stop glittering against the starlight. She thinks about what she knows about Lucretia and what she's said, and the vehemence behind it.

She remembers the shock of door-mouse Lucretia leaning up and kissing her, her words quick and soft, her eyes hard so many years ago. The tug of her pulling her back and the weight of her against her body and the heat of it, drunken words and honesty. And she thinks, and she remembers, and she weighs her next words carefully.   

“Lucretia,” Lup says softly. “Do you still… are you, are you still in love with me?”

“Yes,” Lucretia breathes out, eyes still closed as she presses her forehead to her knees. “I’m sorry.”  

“Don’t apologize,” Lup says.  “You can’t help how you feel, so never apologize for it.”

“I didn’t want you to know,” Lucretia answers. “I never wanted you to worry about it.”

“Honey, you… you broke that down a hundred years ago.”

“Seventy.”

Lup laughs once, loud and sharp. “You said as much back then, I just… didn’t think you were entirely serious, since you never… Did anything after that night.”

“Did you expect me to?”

“I don't know,” Lup admits. “Maybe. I thought that maybe it was something you wanted so badly you'd be brave for it.”

Lucretia considers for a moment. “No,” she says softly. “No.”

Lup nods. “No,” she agrees. “No, I was wrong. Sometimes you want things so badly it scares you. You feel stuck by it.”

“You were scared of how you felt about Barry,” Lucretia says. It isn't a question. She remembers Lup’s face as she tucked her violin to her chin on the world with the recitals. Remembers the small shake she saw in her shoulders as she inhaled just once before they started to play.

“Fucking terrified,” Lup supplies. Her voice is faint, but her face is soft when Lucretia cracks her eyes to look at her.

Lucretia can almost see the mess of her feelings on her face, thirty years long and still overflowing and making her mouth quirk up and her brows pinch, the fondness agonizing.

“You never had a thing to be afraid of,” Lucretia whispers. She’s seen the same expression on Barry’s face, when he looks at her when she’s goofing with Taako, when she’s cooking or running algorithms to track the light. A fondness so intense that it almost looks like pain, something so tender to look at that it scrapes Lucretia raw on the inside. “Neither of you.”

_Not like me_ , she doesn't say.

“I wouldn't go there,” Lup laughs. “He still scares me sometimes. I worry about him, and I worry about myself and him together, and I'm scared, like a lot. Sometimes I wake up and it’s, it’s scary. Like, _wow_ , I love this person and they’re right _there_ , and… Well, that’s just part of life, honey. You get scared. You worry. You get locked into place for a bit, but once you figure out the holding pattern, you get out of it.”

Lucretia thinks about it for a second. “Hey, Lup?”

“Yeah, Lucy?”

Lucretia tucks her chin back between her knees, fingers laced against her ankles. She looks at her hands, dark and slim in the silvery light. For now, her hands are smooth, nails dutifully clipped and unblemished. Tomorrow, she’ll work in the engine room, in the lab, on the bridge and soon her hands would crack and blister and bleed. And she’d welcome ever ragged nail and torn cuticle for what it represented.

The resets are the worst, because she goes back to what she was. Resets bring back the nightmares, bring back the fear and the loneliness, bring back the person she was. She's come to hate her recorded state the most, soft skinned and only physically capable of the barest minimum, her mind overflowing with things that her body can't quite keep up with. Tomorrow morning, she will once again clip her hair close so it won't get caught on anything or bother her as she works, and she will pull on the coveralls and she will _work._ In time, she'll reach a place where she's okay with it all. Sometimes she thinks she's almost there. 

“Did you _want_ me to do anything?” she asks.

Lup pauses. “That, now _that,_ is one hell of a question,” she murmurs.

Her fingers are still rubbing circles against the base of her spine, and Lucretia wants to doze in this, bask in the feeling as Lup’s hand slides up her back to cover the back of her neck with the entirety of her palm, then shifts. Lup’s thumb presses into her neck, up against her spine and rubs her thumb up and down. Lucretia gives a sigh and then a very quiet groan, the burn of the knotted muscle making her stomach hot and her toes curl into the deck of the ship.

She can't remember the last time she was simply touched just for the sake of being touched. When was the last hug she'd gotten? When was the last time she's _given_ one?  What was the last skin contact she’d had, other than brief high fives and fist bumps? She doesn't think about needing contact often, but she does need it, apparently. The touch is grounding, reassuring.

“You are an eternal surprise, Luce,” Lup says, voice hitching into a soft chuckle. “Maybe I did. Maybe I still do.”

“I won't,” Lucretia breathes quietly.

“Maybe you _should_ ,” Lup counters. She twists her body slightly, reaching with her free hand to tuck a curl behind Lucretia’s ear. “Maybe you should keep surprising me.”

Lucretia shakes her head slowly, drowsy and heavy and relaxed. Her mouth tastes like peaches and Lup's arm goes around her and gently tugs.

She lets herself tip, allows herself this. Lup is warm at her side and solid. She is alive still, present and breathing and alive like the spread-eagle red blur on the earth below was never there. She's alive, like Lucretia wants her to be, and she is at her side, like she wants her to stay.

“I can't, Lup,” she says. “I can't win that competition, I won't.”

“You can do so much more than you know,” Lup repeats gently, rubbing Lucretia's arm. “And it's never a _competition_. I'm not a prize and neither is my love.”

Lucretia's eyes burn and she sags against Lup, exhausted. “Lup, I'm—I didn’t—not like that.”

“Shh, Lucy, I know. You're drunk.”

“ _Yes_.”

“Sleep, we’ll talk tomorrow,” Lup promises. She squeezes Lucretia softly, her nose brushing her temple as she lays her forehead to the top of Lucretia’s scalp.

“Talk?” Lucretia murmurs.

Lup hums an ascent, sliding back just a bit to let Lucretia sag against her body. Lucretia leans and then slips down, curling her knees  up to Lup’s side, her head on Lup’s lap. The position would almost be lewd, her face tucked against Lup’s stomach and one arm folded against Lup’s legs, but she’s comfortable and Lup is just so warm, her hand in her hair, stroking through it in slow, even movements.

Lucretia inhales slowly, catching the faintest whiff of peaches and she sighs, sighs, and melts into unconsciousness.

Lup watches her for a long time, watches the rise and fall of her chest, plays with her hair, rubbing her fingers through curls and stroking her cheek absently. Lucretia is gone for the time being, deeply asleep, barely stirring at all. Lup hears footsteps on the deck, a sound that she's become so familiar with that it surprises her. 

“Hey,” Barry says softly. “Did you figure out what was hitting the shield?”

“It was Lucy,” Lup says softly, looking over her shoulder. “She was havin’ her own private party and kickin’ it.”

She pats the deck with her free hand. “Still enough left for you too, bud. Grab a piece of deck with me.”

He pads over and lowers himself beside her, leaning into her. “She okay?” he whispers, looking down at Lucretia with her swollen eyes and the shot glass and half-empty bottle nearby.

“Just a little heartsick,” Lup murmurs, tracing her finger against the line of Lucretia’s arm. “I spooked her, stepping off of the ship like that. I didn't realize she was still…”

“She's always going to be afraid of that year,” Barry says, tucking his arm around Lup’s waist. He lays his head on her shoulder, looking out at the system before them, eyes tracking the movement of the planes in absent habit. “And shit, Lup, I _knew_ you were gonna… and I still… It’s just a fact.”

“She just… she got so strong, Bear, I forgot,” Lup says. “She's more than I could have imagined.”

“And you imagine her a fair bit, too.”

Lup shakes with restrained laughter. “Shut up, don't make me wake her up—“

“I’m not making you do anything,” Barry says, squeezing her side softly.

Lup snorts and presses her cheek up against Barry’s, turning to press a quick kiss against the corner of his mouth. “You are; you’re teasing.”

He turns and catches her in another kiss.  “Yeah, I am.”

He pulls away and shrugs off his robe, rolling it up as he lays back onto the deck. He tucks it under his head, shifting onto his side as Lup slides down to lay beside him, Lucretia’s head still pillowed on her stomach.

“So, she passed out?”

“More or less,” Lup says. “She got drunk and tired herself out and she needed some comfort.”

She lays her cheek against his chest, one hand cupped over Lucretia’s neck, the other reaching out to intertwine with Barry’s.

“Bear,” she whispers, “She still loves me.”

“Yeah, I know,” he murmurs. “It’s obvious, if you watch her watch you.”

Lup looks at Barry out of the corner of her eye, smirking slightly. She doesn’t have to comment on the fact that it’s ironic that he could see _Lucretia_ was in love with her, but was oblivious for decades to the fact that _she’d_ been in love with _him_. He catches the look and shrugs slightly.

She huffs out a small laugh and curls a finger around a white-blonde ringlet against Lucretia’s temple.

“She doesn’t want to do anything about it,” Lup says.

“Do you _want_ her to?”

Lup laughs, closing her eyes as Barry brings her hand to his mouth. “She asked the same thing,” she says. “I do. I want her to try. She could blow me out of the water, she’s done it before. She just keeps on, growing and changing and I’m… I’m lucky, that you love me and that I love you, and that she loves me, too, and that there’s been time to _learn_ her, to love her too.”

Barry nods and kisses her knuckles softly before dropping their hands to his chest. He watches the galaxies overhead, the slight ripple of the barrier as the ship cruises forwards.

“I don’t want to leave her alone anymore,” Lup murmurs sleepily. “Her or you—I don’t want you to be alone, either, Bear. She was so upset that I died, that what we did meant that we didn’t trust her to keep us all safe again, but I—how do I tell her? That I did it, that _we_ did it, because we love everyone? I don’t want to leave, I don’t want to die and leave you or Taako or Lucretia alone. Or any of the others.  I love you too much. Lucy’s upset because she loves me, too.”

“Then _don’t_ leave us alone, Lup,” Barry says. “Just because we can die and still be around, doesn’t mean we _have_ to. That can be how you tell her, tell them. Just be there, and _stay_.”

Lup yawns and nuzzles against him for a moment and he lets his eyes falls shut as she squeezes his fingers.

“Yeah,” she whispers. “Yeah. I’m not going anywhere during the year, I can promise that. I’ll tell Lucy that tomorrow. She won’t be alone, she’s got me. She’s gonna have me, whether she likes it or not. She’s stuck with me now.”

Lucretia dreams of warmth and love, and when she wakes up with a splitting headache, she finds herself on the deck in Lup’s arms, Barry’s arm slung over Lup’s waist and fingers on the crook of her elbow and she vaguely recalls Lup’s coy _maybe you should_.

She slips an arm around Lup and mirrors Barry’s touch, her fingers ginger against his shoulder, and goes back to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> And then when Lucretia wakes up again, she's in the center of an IPRE cuddle puddle because Magnus tripped over them first thing in the morning, and Lup sent out a ship-wide message spell that said _Hugs needed STAT_.


End file.
